Innovation:

Journalism took a beating in 2016. Donald Trump was elected president, thwarting pollsters and shaking off seemingly endless fact-checking. News organizations continue to lay off journalists … Read More

Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon speaks during a news conference in Ferguson, Mo. Violent protests in Ferguson erupted in the wake of the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer on Aug. 9. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)Coming late to the Ferguson story, I have a modest thought to add to the ongoing discussion of why the police shooting and the bumbling local response to protests happened there.

We will soon find out whether patronage and racism have kept the police force as it is. But as for white dominance in elections, that seems as if it could only be explained by the black majority being uninvolved and unorganized politically. Rev. Al Sharpton observed as much Sunday, calling for a registration drive and improvement of a dismal 12 percent turnout rate in the last election.

Freivogel, who was a long time Post-Dispatch staffer from 1971 to the mid-2000s, added "the P-D never intensely covered Ferguson or north county. But it was certainly covered more heavily than now."

Adam Goodman, deputy managing editor of the Post-Dispatch, confirmed that in an e-mail:

The Post-Dispatch used to have a North County bureau, which I believe we closed in 2007. Ferguson was one of many north St. Louis County communities covered by two reporters in that office. We used to zone a North County page twice a week. Our sister Suburban Journals publications ended their weekly North County edition in 2011.

But, Goodman said, the Post-Dispatch has still made it out to Ferguson to cover important stories like the dismissal of a popular black school superintendent or continuing foreclosure issues.

My own reporting and Steve Waldman's FCC study both found that metros, which have been forced to make the deepest cute news staff in the last decade, typically denuded their suburban coverage and pulled back to the city limits.

I visited this phenomenon five years ago in a story "Alhambra, Calif.: The Little Town News Forgot." Four times the population of Ferguson, Alhambra is a suburban community of small bungalows, just north of prosperous South Pasadena. It once had its own daily newspaper and subsequently was covered by a small Los Angeles Times bureau and the Pasadena Star-News until the early 2000s. Then coverage dropped from several stories a week in the Times to five or six a year.

Meantime Alhambra demographics, like Ferguson's, changed radically. From a mostly white community, it became a center for Hispanic and Asian immigrant groups with some white and a very small African-American population remaining. Indicators of civic vitality were remarkably low, in part because many in the major ethnic groups could not speak each others' language.

To be clear, the erosion of newspaper coverage in Ferguson and a vast swath of suburban/exurban communities where so many Americans choose to live undercuts democracy. But the remedy, if one is forthcoming, is not going to be a revival of newspaper coverage -- but rather something else, something new, something digital.